Well I've thought really hard about all this now, and have
come to only one realization. I don't need other people to
judge me or what I do. It doesn't bother me now, I'm over
it, and I'm just going to work on jabber, because even if
others don't use it I damn well will, and everyone else can
go away.

Just today a horrible thing happened. Advogato members
decided that someone certifying me as Master was wrong, and
that my certifying of him as Master was wrong. They
believed
that our interpretation of the Master level criteria was
wrong. I beg to differ. First I would like to begin by
describing the project that I work on, because it seems to
have become the central reason for everything.

I develop on the Jabber Project, a 100% open source, XML
based, real time instant messaging system. I really hate to
use the term instant messaging now because it brings out so
many fears due to abuse of the term by the large corps such
as AOL, and the former ICQ (now AOL). People only see this
as a simple system to chat with people, but we (the jabber
project) believe this to be the most base layer of jabber
(pardon my not capitalizing it for respect, but I'm typing
fast as I think through all that just happened), it's
ability to encompass anyone's existing IM protocol into it's
own. The true power of jabber lies in it's ability to
create a stream of XML data routed through the internet
between two (soon to be more) points. This amounts to tons
of potential, because XML can so exactly describe any
structured conversation (even the most random conversation
has some sort of logic due to the brain's ability to click
up
thoughts on apparently random topics). The potential for
this is huge. And even this is just another layer to the
power we call jabber. I would invite everyone to go to our
website to read more
about jabber itself.

I now feel it is important to describe myself, and then my
relationship to jabber. I am a 19 year old college dropout
(yes I'm a dropout). Why did I dropout? Because I began
developing on a project during my Freshman year (when I was
18) called jabber. It was very young back then only 0.6
release number and still had a long way to go. My view of
the project was limited to the idea of talking to all my IM
friends through a single client. I quickly joined it's
ranks and advanced to a "vice head" of the project. It was
now the beginning of my Sophmore year. I was doing ok in
school, but was slowly being drawn away to work on jabber.
I had slowly come to realize that this tool was completely
missing from the internet, and had huge amounts of
possiblity beyond what any of us had originally envisioned.
It was now semester break and I made a life changing
decision. I was going to leave school. This happened for
two reasons. 1) My family reached a point where money was
very tight, and 2) I loved programming on open source
projects so much that I couldn't contain myself. So I began
my job hunt. I approached many of the local programming
houses, but none were that appealing. I can no longer
fathom writing software that I'm not letting the public use
at large. Then luck hit. The company that employed jeremie
(jer, the other party in this Master ordeal) Webb Interactive approached
me to work on jabber (I believe I have jer to thank for this
miracle). This was a dream come true, but I was very
apprehensive of the whole thing. A lot of "what ifs" filled
my head. I eventually said, "Ahh screw it, I'm just going
to have to go for it." The oppurtunity was too true and
good to pass up. I got my contract and signed on. My
contract is amazing. It basically says I work on jabber,
and that's it. Webb Interactive believes in jabber so much
to hire me and jer, with fairly liberal contracts, that it
astounded me.

So we now more or less reach advogato. I first found
advogato thanks to a few friends from jabber work. I
thought "excellent, I've been looking for a weblog for my
jabber work and other thoughts in general." So I signed up
and read everything carefully and then moved on after
certifying a few people to the level they respectably
deserved according to the guidelines. I often felt bad for
giving some people only apprentice, but it is what the
guidelines described. I gave jer a Master level rating,
because I believed him to fit in the guidelines. He and I
devote all our time to jabber and we believe this to be a
(if not soon) vital component to the internet. We
constantly evangelize this system and strive for other
components to be open sourced that are being done as
professional services for companies. He in turn gave me the
same ranking once he figured out the rating system.

Hell started to break loose. All of a sudden I no long had
Journeyer status (this could have been due to the rubrik, I
never really checked it) and I was being told our actions
were being discussed in other IRC channels. This was
surprising, and I was a little riled by it. I reviewed the
notes on the site and found everything to be as it should,
yet arguments went unheard. One of the oppositions was that
jabber was not an "important" (I love the use of quotes here
to leave wide open interpretation) open source project. I
talked with one of the opposers and tried to figure out
the beef with the project. I could not convince them. I
become slightly angered and left the conversation. I
unfortunately never was able to point out that we are
already in talks with major companies looking to integrate
Jabber into their systems. Some of these companies being
very large open source supporters, some enterprise level,
some smaller. I'm sorry for the one I talked with who could
not look out of his limited view.

I was told about the reason for the inception of Advogato by
X-Virge, who helps with both GNOME and with Jabber and I
wold like to quote what he told me:

[18:26:11] <x-virge> raph started advogato as a sort of
psychological experiment to see what would happen

[18:26:24] <x-virge> and this would prove that humans
bring
politics into things way too quickly

[18:26:35] <x-virge> even in a place where it really
makes
no difference

This is a turning point in this test, I would say, as it
proves one of my worst fears for the open source community,
politics are everywhere. Bias and a natural political
nature seem to fill so many people, and I'm deeply saddened
by it. I try to stay out of it as much as possible, but I
fell deep into it today and it saddens me. I had ended my
conversation with the doubter angrily and tauntingly, I
apologize for that, but I will still come find you when
jabber is big ;-) I also ended by saying that if Advogato
adds a user remove ability I would remove my user to settle
this. That offer still stands, and I will do this, but I
would like to point out a clip from the mission statement of
Advogato regarding the peer review system:

What makes the system interesting is that it's attack
resistant. If a bunch of attackers were to create lots of
accounts and mutually certify each other, only a very few
would be accepted by the trust metric, assuming there were
only a few certificates from legitimate members to the
hackers.

I'm sorry it had to come to this, but I'm hanging in the
throes of my decisions now, awaiting some peer review of
what has happened. I meerly mean to submit this, as my peer
review (as that is what we are based on) of this peer review
system.

So it's been a while since I've entered stuff. I believe I
will start doing it daily now. I had thought I would store
my diary on my computer at box5 but this is a cooler
forum. Finally making great progress on the jabber+ssl
stuff. I'm thinking I can have my server running it by late
tonight (that means actually tomorrow morning like 1 or
2am). This step will just add leaps and bounds to jabber.

Had a discussion with jer and bittrance about US crypto
law. Wasn't very in depth, but just once again makes me
realize US laws are all about making the US look good, and
having no real practical purpose.

We're shooting for pre3 by the weekend, pre3 is a huge
milstone. I'll be able to refocus after that to the all
important docs (damn you openssl, learn documentation) and
helping the client authors (primarily gabber at this point).

Today sucked. I got a massive head ache in the right side
of my head and that stopped me from progressing as much as I
wanted on a few projects. The tg0d bbs is still slow
coming, but it's gotten a lot better. The admin interface
is almost there. I'm working on the new buddy list for
Gabber. Hopefully, I can get pretty far by the time I
actually go to sleep. I found a few more bugs in the
jserver build process to clean up (Stupid m4 macros).

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